Term

Spring 2018

Time

TTh 2–3:15pm

Location

136 DeBartolo

Instructor

Dr. David Chiang

Prerequisites

Discrete Mathematics (CSE 20110) or equivalent. You especially need to be comfortable with sets, tuples, functions, relations, and graphs; and writing proofs by contradiction and by induction.

Required text

Michael Sipser's Introduction to the Theory of Computation, 3rd edition:

	3rd Edition, 2012 ISBN: 1-133-18779-X Links: Amazon errata
	3rd International Edition, 2012 (recommended) ISBN: 1-133-18781-1 Links: Amazon errata

Description

Introduction to formal languages and automata, computability theory, and complexity theory with the goal of developing understanding of the power and limits of different computational models. Topics covered include:

• regular languages and finite automata
• context-free grammars and pushdown automata
• Turing machines; undecidable languages
• the classes P and NP; NP completeness

Links

The following sites will be used in this course:

• Sakai for submitting assignments and receiving grades
• Piazza for questions and answers
• Slack for informal discussion
• Notes and assignments will be linked from here, but you can also clone the Github repository
• Tutorial on using LaTeX and TikZ

Throughout the semester, you will implement some of the ideas you've learned in a series of three text-processing tools.

In Project 1, you'll implement nondeterministic finite automata (NFA). Nondeterminism (essentially, unbounded parallelism) is one of the core concepts in the course, and implementing it will demonstrate how to simulate nondeterminism on deterministic hardware.

In Project 2, you'll write a parser for regular expressions and combine it with NFAs to build a regular expression matcher like grep. Your implementation will be asymptotically much faster than an implementation would be that uses Perl or Python's built-in regular expressions.

In Project 3, you'll use your regular expression engine to implement a fragment of sed. You'll also show how, in principle, any computer program could be compiled into this fragment of sed.

In Project 4, you'll extend your regular expression matcher to handle backreferences. Although this has a large speed penalty, you'll show how this extended matcher can be used to solve the Boolean satisfiability problem.

• You can work in teams of up to three. Each team member should contribute a roughly equal amount of work.
• You can write in C++ (including all standard libraries except <regex>) or Python (including all standard libraries except re). Python is recommended. You can also write in another language with permission from the instructor.

Attendance

Students are expected to attend all classes. Foreseeable absences should be discussed with the instructor ahead of time.

Late Work

In the case of a serious illness or other excused absence, as defined by university policies, coursework submissions will be accepted late by the same number of days as the excused absence.

Otherwise, you may submit some problems on time for full credit, and other problems late with a penalty of 10% per day (rounded down to the nearest point). No problem can be submitted more than once.

Students with Disabilities

Any student who has a documented disability and is registered with Disability Services should speak with the professor as soon as possible regarding accommodations. Students who are not registered should contact the Office of Disability Services.

Honor Code

Copyright

All course materials written by the instructor and published on this website are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, which prohibits reuse for commercial purposes.

All course materials written by the instructor and distributed privately (including through Sakai) should not be redistributed in any way; doing so is a violation of both US copyright law and the University of Notre Dame Honor Code.